Chapter 27 #2
Something pressed at the edges of my perception, with the animal awareness of movement just outside the light’s reach. There and then gone. The skittering of too many legs against stone. Up high. Not on the ground.
It dropped from the ceiling in the time it took me to register where the sound was coming from. Dark, fast, huge. Its fangs dripped venom.
“What’s the lesson here?” I demanded, because there was no pretending that he was not tutoring me at every turn.
“Don’t let the Spiderwolf close. Strike for the eyes.” He moved in front of me, taking the lead. “And watch my back. They like to work in packs.”
“Packs?” I demanded, and then I cringed, my body reacting before my mind caught up to something above me in the dark, even before a drop of something liquid landed on my cheek. I let out a cry as the eyes opened, a dozen gleaming eyes just above me, and I lashed out at it with my sword.
For a few moments there was nothing that mattered for me but surviving. Then we were surrounded by what was left of the things, and there was nothing else moving in the dark but the last one that Fear was fighting. I scrubbed my face with my sleeve.
“Talk to me.” Fear’s voice, from my left, between one slash and the next. Unhurried. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re fighting for our lives.”
“Cara.”
“Not now.”
His gaze found me in the flickering light with its usual thoroughness, trying to read what I had decided not to show him. “I won’t let any monster touch you.”
The sound that came out of me was short and sharp and not quite a laugh.
I won’t let any monster touch you.
I’d let a monster touch me. I had wanted his hands on me.
The Spiderwolf collapsed as he pulled his blade free. Its enormous body blocked the branch to our right.
Fear shrugged and went left; what did it matter which way we went now?
But I felt it matter. “Fear. We’re being herded.”
He glanced at me, then away to the tunnel. “You’re right.”
He stared around us, that relentless, brilliant mind grinding away at the problem.
“We’re in a blind spot in the magic. That mirror—” He nodded at the surface at the tunnel’s end, flat and dark. “It’s gone dead.”
“A trap.”
“A trap,” he confirmed as he moved closer. Not to me so much as around me, the instinct of a man who puts himself between threats and those he’s decided to protect. His shoulder near mine. The warmth of him in the cold of the cavern. “The queen doesn’t want anyone to see what happens here.”
“I don’t want to see it either.” The bitterness came out unguarded.
There was a question in his golden gaze as it found mine. Concern. For me or for his plan or for both, intermingled. I had the feeling it had become both for him, Lightbringer and I braided into one.
Lightbringer and I, both used. There was no love in that.
Then he looked up, and I followed his gaze. I could see nothing in the darkness, and then he lifted one of the torches and flung it into the air. It went end over end, sending flickers of flame and shadow alternating over the wall, and then I saw the Skein.
The antechamber ceiling was vaulted and high.
I could see them now that I knew to look: the pale shape pressed against the ceiling like something painted there, wings folded tight, their elongated body motionless.
Waiting. Then I picked out the second one.
By the time the torch had fallen back to earth between us, the fire smothered by the sand, I knew what was above.
And I had decided what to do.
My hand went to his belt while his attention was on the Skein. I had told myself I would not be weak. I lifted the small vial—I didn’t even think about it, my fingers closing on glass—and in one fluid motion, I stole the potion from his belt and palmed it.
The monster writhed past us, wings flapping desperately, and I plunged in after it. I just wanted to get away from him.
Fear cursed and followed me. We reached the end of the corridor, where a dark mirror watched over us in a rounded antechamber; here the two of us had room to swing, side-by-side.
As he skidded to a stop at my side, the sound covering us, I dropped the potion.
I didn’t dare give myself the opportunity to second-guess.
The Skein whipped its tail out toward me, and I met it with my blade, and I stepped deliberately on the glass and felt it break beneath my boot.
My monster—the smaller and easier of the two—died first.
I straightened, catching my breath, knowing Fear did not need my help as he struck out at the monster, and it recoiled, hissing, dripping blood.
I was probably more trouble than I was help at this point, given he watched over me—over his mission—just as much as he fought the monsters.
It would be no loss to Bismyth when I went back to Stonehaven.
And so I could see the mirror come alive behind his back, unnoticed.
The space was unidentifiable by its stone walls; it could have been back at the castle or behind the dais.
Tay stood looking at something off to one side, a grin fixed across his face.
Lidi was sitting in a chair that was too tall for her—a normal chair was too tall for her, and the chairs here were sized for longer Fae legs—so she swung her legs as she examined something in her hands, a bauble or toy she seemed to find fascinating.
Mam was hunting around in that space. It took me a second to understand, because she looked like she had when she was annoyed she could not find a gardening tool or—but there was terror on her face too. My own terror kindled in my chest in response.
She was hunting for a weapon.
She would strike out at the queen rather than be raised to the Fae, perhaps as unwilling as I was to lose her mortality. If she did, the Nightwalkers would strike her down.
Her mortal life would end tonight, one way or another.
Pack your bags for Stonehaven.
Unless I preserved her life. Unless I ensured the queen did not raise her hands to my mother for a blessing that was also a punishment.
My throat closed.
Tay laughed at something outside the frame. Lidi looked up from her trinket at the sound and smiled. She was my bright and shining little sister, and after tonight, if I failed her, she would never be herself again.
Mam gripped a fireplace poker. What was in her face was desperate and terrible and full of love.
Something that had been rushing through me since the queen’s study, since the labyrinth that morning, since Maura by the waterfall, settled.
Quietly, very quietly, I slid my sword home into the sheath.
Tonight I will raise three mortals.
Mam’s hand closed around the fireplace poker.
My hand found the knife’s hilt, and I drew it. Not the one he had given me. The other.
Fieran drove the sword through the Skein’s guts. “You were faster than me this time. Putting me to shame as any good student does eventually, though—”
This was the only way to protect them.
While his back was to me, while he was saying something cocky and unbearable—
I drove the knife toward his side. He was exposed, vulnerable.
Lightbringer roared to life. She was in my mind, in my chest, vast and immediate and filled with absolute authority, the bone-deep certainty of the ancient and primal.
“We don’t murder our mates.”
The blade wrenched.
It twisted in my grip, still driven with all the killing force I had behind it. I had one terrible lucid second of understanding exactly what was about to happen—
The knife drove into my thigh.
It cleaved flesh all the way until it struck bone, so hard the tip turned, and the world contracted to that point, and I heard myself cry out from far away, and the stone floor came toward me.
I had failed my family. And it hadn’t been him who stopped me.
It had been my dragon. The one who wouldn’t speak to me, who wouldn’t fly with me, whose sense of being trapped with Fear had mixed with mine.
When it mattered, when I had made my choice and driven toward it with everything I had, she had finally made herself known. On his side. Not on mine.
Now Tay and Lidi and my mother would be lost.
Agony came over me like a wave.
He turned, his eyes wide with fear and panic. There was something raw across his face, something uncontrolled and unfamiliar.
“Cara!”
He leapt to catch me, dropping his blade that dripped with monster ichor. It clanged against the ground as he wrapped his arms around me.
His arms came around me. He bore me to the ground with gentleness, then his hands were moving over me, fast and careful, as he checked my wound.
“How did this happen?” The frantic quality of his voice was something I had never heard. “Cara, stay with me. I need to—”
His hand went to his belt. His fingers found the leather flap. Found it loose. Found the empty place where the vial had been.
“I’m a fool.” Horror in his voice. “It’s gone.”
The blade pulsed with agony. “Take it out.”
“No.” He was already moving, his arms certain around me. “You’ll bleed out faster. I have to get you back. Get you to a healer.”
He lifted me. Smooth despite the urgency, his arms steady, and my head fell against his shoulder. I stared up at the labyrinth ceiling, trapped in the terrible tenderness of being carried by someone I had just tried to kill. Someone who does not understand it yet but will.
The world was a hot blur of pain, and I could not think through how to lie to him. How to keep him on my side. How to get him to help Tay and Lidi once he knew I would kill him for their sake.
He was what I needed right now. I hated him for that, and I hated her, the dragon who was supposed to be mine.
“How did I lose it,” he said, moving fast through the dark, speaking half to himself. “I checked it before we left. I always—”
He stopped speaking.
His arms didn’t loosen. His stride didn’t break.
His gaze fell to the blade buried in my thigh, the hilt jutting up, blood leaking around it. That relentless mind was turning, making sense of where the knife had come from, the angle, the force to drive it so deep.
Then his horrified gaze rose to mine, and I turned my face into his shoulder so he could not see what was written there.